Gleenings from Gleedom
There’s a type of television program that achieves high levels of fandom that I don’t have any interest in watching, but I want to know about anyway – as a cultural study to understand its appeal to its audience and what makes it a cultural touchstone. I have come to see any number of clips from the show “Glee”, heard some fans talk about it, read various articles about it, and I have come to a conclusion.
The Superbowl promotions demonstrate that the show has “Jumped the Shark” in a rather classic motif of the phrase. At some point, the show found its “Bad Guy” — an annoying character of cartoonish supervillian motives the viewer is meant to love to hate, someone whose values are the opposite of all the Glee fan holds dear. What the Superbowl promos show is that she has become the show, and with it the dynamic of the show, Glee, narrows considerably. Which is a little odd to suggest, as the show itself has always been broad with little room for subtleties. But if we understand a basic dimension of the show has the heroes of the misfits in the Glee Club pitted in ways overly familiar with the “in” crowd of jocks and cheerleaders, marking the bad guy as the coach of the cheer squad motivated to undermine the Glee Club at every turn just — just ’cause — brings the show to eat at itself. There are any number of ways the show can promote itself on this broad audience — it has become a vehicle that has pushed a lot of itune purchases, and has its well orchestrated routines of popular music classics to lean on — but she was omnipresent.
Take this clip, which travelled well on the Internet when aired, a rather blunt as a boulder item of preachy moralizing with its obvious appeal — but, organic to the show. Compare it to this explanation for the post-Superbowl time slot plot line:
A defining notion in “Jump the Shark” dom, tricks for ratings grabs, somewhere outside the nature of organic production. Also a sign of things: self-directed dialouge ala “I’m bored.”
But I don’t know. The person who suggested she watches less than she did because of the centralizing of the “bad guy” may be out of step with the audience writ large. Also, the show did wind its way to the Thriller production, after all. I can think of three other shows where a character took over and became its face, and two of them probably really didn’t have any identify before that happened. (Without any regard to taste, levels of deriviativeness to the program, and etc: Family Matters and Melrose Place). The third is where Glee seems to fit into place, and its the origin of the “Jump the Shark” phrase in the first place.
For the life of me, I don’t know if my position as basically un-concerned outsider, non-viewer, makes me less qualified in making these observations — I’m largely relaying something someone else has expressed with a glean off of how annoying her presence in the Superbowl ads were — or if not really watching it but having a passing interest in the nature of these things makes me apt to see the forest from the trees.
Did Elmo overtake Sesame Street?